Magwitch in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations
A Man-Made Monster and His Way of Salvation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22218331 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Most Mushfeka Zannat (Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 112-119 |
| Publication date | 2022-05-06 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Linguistics Literature & Translation (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2617-0299 • E-ISSN: 2708-0099 |
| Publisher | Al-Kindi Center for Research and Development (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.32996/ijllt.2022.5.5.14 |
| OpenAlex | W4229041735 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
This paper intends to investigate the reality of the 19th-century Victorian society regarding crime, punishment as well as how society can make a person a monster. Investigating the reasons for being a monster is a major concern of this research. Moreover, this paper seeks to identify the way of achieving salvation and the causes for choosing a particular path of salvation. Since this research is theoretical in nature, relevant data has been collected from already published works. In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch is a key character who can be considered a man-made monster because society and its people never treat him as a human being. Rather, he has always been treated as an outcast due to his low birth and criminal past. Besides, he has never got a proper education. As a result, no one has offered him a white-collar job. So, merely for survival, he has indulged in crimes, and he had to commit crimes repeatedly because society already tagged him as a monster who bears no goodness. At the same time, people in society consider him as an outcast, but it is the society and its legal system that made him a monster by doing several injustices against him because of the prejudices toward the lower-class that view them as inherently evil. Besides, Compayson, his partner in crime, scapegoats him for all crimes. Finally, this research focuses on how he finds a way of salvation, a metaphorical one, to save his guilt-stricken soul. He wants to be a creator of a gentleman. So, he chooses Pip to make him a gentleman, and this is to be his way of salvation. Due to the influence of classism and false consciousness, he decides to make Pip a gentleman, only to be accepted by society not as a monster but as a human being. By the end of the novel, he definitely gets salvation and is transformed into a human being from a man-made monster
Art · Commit · Criminology · Epistemology · Literature · Monster · Political science · Sociology · Soul · Computer Science · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Law · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Social Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
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